Thoughts on the temple changes?

There was a discussion some time ago in the thread Women and Obeying/Hearkening Covenants. One thing mentioned during the discussion that I found interesting was the idea that people receiving their own endowment in 1870, 1989, 1996, and 2019 would all covenant to something slightly different and a question was raised about which standard people would be held to. The covenant originally made in the temple, the covenant as it exists in its most recent iteration, or some future unknown iteration. It’s an interesting thought exercise. At least to me.

Who writes the temple ceremony script, anyway?

The short version is that a temple script didn’t exist until 1877. Until then it was oral tradition. Going light on the details, BY commissioned the script and it was assembled via a committee of people doing their best to remember all the details. It was a process where the script was refined. It would be another few decades before the script was standardized to be the same in every temple. I get the feeling that in the early days each temple had their slight variations on how they did things.

I have no idea but these days there’s probably a committee that receives instructions about what to change from the prophet (or first presidency and/or Q12) and I’m sure that they must approve of the version that the committee comes up with. No telling who does the actual edits, it could be members of the Q15, but I’m sure they have to ultimately be approved by the sitting prophet.

But even with the changes (assuming what we have read is correct), why doesn’t it feel like a positive thing for me?

I think it’s a good change, the rising generations hopefully won’t be subject to the same types of pain, but I get it. People have been hurt by the old language and it feels like there’s no institutional recognition of that.

Rising generations may end up being completely unaware of the changes and could invalidate people’s pain by telling them that there haven’t been any changes. People that are aware of the changes may invalidate other’s experiences by making the subject too taboo to talk about. Some might say that there haven’t been any changes to kill the conversation before it can begin. Either way we’re asked to move on and to not talk about the changes. The problem is that often healing requires open dialog.

It can feel like communicating the equivalent of, “You’re wrong. That never happened.”

The first time I attended the temple I asked my bishop in the celestial room if all this was received by JS. He answered that it was, it could be that he didn’t know, or didn’t want to open up an hour long discussion on changes. He probably didn’t know.

I think these are positive changes. My DW and I were talking about it this morning and how it removes the subservient role of women, and at least some of us have been ahead of the curve on these changes. I remember when we were married and I cringed a little inside when some of those right hand ordinances were performed. I didn’t want my DW to feel less than me or that her views were somehow less valid than mine. Ultimately having the man have the final say in a relationship is hard to justify.

Neither of us has been inside for over a year, for many reasons. Being nearly full time caregivers for aging parents means time off is seldom.

Maybe will spark a general resurgence in attendance for a while, like when there were the 5 new films that were rotated through.

I think that there will be unintended consequence here in terms of men’s engagement and attendance at church. Christianity in general has quite a gender imbalance, with worldwide church attendance being 61% female and 39% male. Take a look around in most any congregation, including Mormon congregations, and you’ll see quite a surplus of women. The reason for this is that for the last 700 years or so, Christianity has been feminizing, and Christian churches are well-engineered to cater to the needs of women, often at the expense of the needs of men. The evidence for this (besides the lop-sided gender ratio at church) is that more men than women are leaving the Church. If the LDS Church offers a better deal to men than to women, then why are more men leaving? The answer is that the Church doesn’t offer better deal to men. Christian Churches are primarily feminine spaces designed to focus on women’s needs and women’s experiences, which is why you’ll see so many men in church sitting there looking bored or playing with their phone. The only masculine space in an LDS Church building is the cultural hall (gym), which is where, at any given time, most of the men can actually be found.

You may point to the all-male leadership of the Church as evidence of Patriarchy, but the reality of the numbers reveals that the Church is an army of women with a few male generals. The Church is largely run by women, for women. Which means that this temple endowment change takes a bad deal for men and makes it worse.

I don’t think that anybody believed that the previous temple endowment gave the husband some kind of priesthood right to disregard his wife’s wishes and do whatever he wanted over her objections. Quite the contrary – we have all seen many men in the Church who respond to pretty much anything their wife says with “Yes, Dear.” Everyone knows that women run the household in many/most marriages, and I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that, either in theory or in practice, the old temple endowment gave men some kind of real usable relationship power and authority that women don’t have.

I argue that the Church already gives a better deal to women than to men, as evidenced by the 3:2 ratio of women to men in the Church, and also evidenced by the fact that more men that women are leaving the Church. This new endowment makes that deal worse by stripping away the last little bit of respect and authority that men had in the Church. I understand why the Church had to make these changes. It may bolster female participation, but I also think it will mean even lower attendance and participation from men.

Inquiring Mind,

I do believe that the LDS church emphasis on family does tend to domesticate men and that is positive for women seeking stable family relationships.

I also believe that having a lay male priesthood can give men a position of honor, respect, and responsibility in the church and community that can make them feel needed and useful. If women were to receive the priesthood I do believe that some men would feel that they just became obsolete or superfluous.

I do not believe that the recent temple changes will result in the same types of soul searching as to what man’s new role is in the church and family going forward.

The film is the best part of the endowment. Agree with making it more friendly to women, but cutting the film? I’d rather cut some of the other stuff down.

Regarding the hidden matriarchal structures in the church, it’s always seemed to me, locally at least that Relief Society looks after members better than the Elders’ Quorum… They also have far more activities on the go than we do. Oh and less pressure to serve a mission although many do.

Christian Churches are primarily feminine spaces designed to focus on women’s needs and women’s experiences, which is why you’ll see so many men in church sitting there looking bored or playing with their phone. The only masculine space in an LDS Church building is the cultural hall (gym), which is where, at any given time, most of the men can actually be found.

Ironically it gets even worse in female led churches elsewhere. While this gives me empathy with what women put up with in male dominated churches, I have sat in a presbyterian service once listening to a sermon/talk on women’s issues of a nature of little or no interest to me – nearly all of the power structure of that parish was female with one slightly weak man included.

What I’ve learnt over the years is that gender equality barely exists. Some walks of life are male dominated and some female dominated. This applies to churches too.

Regarding the hidden matriarchal structures in the church, it’s always seemed to me, locally at least that Relief Society looks after members better than the Elders’ Quorum… They also have far more activities on the go than we do. Oh and less pressure to serve a mission although many do.

Slightly off topic (hope that’s ok), but I think what a lot of feminism doesn’t realize, is that by nature, men are competitive and historically women are the prize. Kudos to feminism, because in most places things were really sucky for them for a very long time. No one likes to be treated as a prize. But as far as the “patriarchy” is concerned… men don’t look out for other men. If anything, they are more apt to look out for and take care of women. It’s still that competitive mindset, with the subconscious end-goal of winning the favor of the ladies. Which is why men, while in some cases being the bigger earners, are much more prevalent than women in the low-wage, dangerous, demeaning positions. It’s nothing new… the overlords have always been sending the young men off to war, while taking their lion’s-share of the wives. It’s men taking advantage of men to (ultimately) increase their standing with women. By contrast, women tend to take care of their own.

In order for something to change, you’re going to need to get a good group of women and some pretty powerful men to be on the side of the disenfranchised men. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But going back to the OP, I still think the changes are a wonderful blessing to women. I don’t think men are harmed in any, and will likely be better for it.

I think back to 5 years ago (or thereabouts) when they released 3 (or thereabouts) films. I think a part of that effort was to spark interest to increase temple attendance and to keep things fresh, not seeing the same video over and over again.

People came back to the temple just to see the new films and what’s more is that they came back frequently to see all of them.

I imagine that the changes alone will be enough to boost temple attendance in the short term, everyone will want to come to see what all the new rumored changes are. Then a year or more later there might be an updated film to do the same thing, get people interested in coming back to see what the new film is like.

But the slideshow does allow for more leeway. On that point.

1) One of the reasons I heard that the new temple videos were longer than the old ones was to give the translations some breathing room. If there’s a slideshow that issue goes away. The more verbose languages can take as much time as needed with no need to sync things up to actions on a film.

2) Like you said, it’s easier to make changes. I wonder how often they plan on making changes to the temple ordinance. I find myself wondering if they plan on making any more significant changes, meaning they know they didn’t get everything they wanted to change in on this go and that there will be another go in the near future. Shrugs. No way of knowing. The precedent is long stretches between changes but that precedent hasn’t held up at all over the last decade, especially in the last year.

But I wonder whether over the long term a “slideshow” will cut it with a generation that’s more accustomed to more glitz from their interactions with media. It’s just… if people fell asleep during the movie what are they going to do with a slideshow? Besides, we’ve had movies for decades, a slideshow does feel like a step back. The church has money and time. They may make a new film even if they do foresee more changes in the near future. Just make another film for those changes.